Dispatches Volume One: What Men Don't Tell Women; One Fell Soup; and Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard

By Roy Blount

Laugh-out-loud observations from “America’s foremost humorist” (Chicago Tribune).
 
What Men Don’t Tell Women: Well, that’s just for starters. Roy Blount Jr. realized that nearly all of his writing involved things people don’t tell people: what Southerners don’t tell Northerners, what the sick don’t want to hear from the well, what no one would ever tell their mother, and what authors rarely admit to their readers. That all changes in this “honest . . . funny” collection of confessional essays about sex, friendship, marriage, male bonding, female patience, and Elvis (The Boston Globe).
 
One Fell Soup: A deliciously funny stew of reviews, diatribes, investigations, meditations, assorted grumblings, and verse about the absurdities of American life, death, fears, and ambition. Included in these fifty-nine easy pieces: the truth (as Blount sees it) about nudism, cricket-fighting, bowling, macaroni and cheese, black holes and black socks, nuclear holocausts, the CIA, domesticated fowl, pork bellies, God, and more. The whole shebang from “one of the most clever (see sly, witty, cunning, nimble) wordsmiths cavorting in the English language” (Carl Hiaasen).
 
Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard: Flesh-eating piranha! Synchronized swimming! Rubber chickens! Edith Wharton! Crossword puzzles! All and then some in this giddy compendium of essays, celebrity profiles, silly games, and side trips. Parts sports journalism, literary criticism, travel writing, and aborted novel, tossed with a few poems and a neo-Biblical one-act play, this is an uproarious—and sometimes heartening—anthology of adventures from “one writer who never fails to please” (The Village Voice).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Oct 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504056038

Roy Blount

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books. The first, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,was expanded into About Three Bricks Shy . . . and the Load Filled Up. It is often called one of the best sports books of all time. His subsequent works have taken on a range of subjects, from Duck Soup, to Robert E. Lee, to what cats are thinking, to how to savor New Orleans, to what it’s like being married to the first woman president of the United States.  Blount is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, an ex-president of the Authors Guild, a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and a member of both the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the band the Rock Bottom Remainders.  In 2009, Blount received the University of North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe Prize. The university cited “his voracious appetite for the way words sound and for what they really mean.” Time places Blount “in the tradition of the great curmudgeons like H. L. Mencken and W. C. Fields.” Norman Mailer has said, “Page for page, Roy Blount is as funny as anyone I’ve read in a long time.” Garrison Keillor told the Paris Review, “Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence.”  Blount’s essays, articles, stories, and verses have appeared in over one hundred and fifty publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, theAtlantic, Sports Illustrated, the Oxford American, and Garden & Gun. He comes from Decatur, Georgia, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Book preview

Dispatches Volume One

What Men Don’t Tell Women; One Fell Soup; and Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard

Roy Blount Jr.

CONTENTS

WHAT MEN DON’T TELL WOMEN

What Men Don’t Tell Women

Where’d You Get That Hat?

Blue Yodel 1

How to Visit the Sick

Blue Yodel 2

What Authors Do

Blue Yodel 3

The Lowdown on Southern Hospitality

Blue Yodel 4

On Hats

Blue Yodel 5

Women in the Locker Room!

Blue Yodel 6

He Took the Guilt out of the Blues

Blue Yodel 7

How to Get a Lot out of Opera

Blue Yodel 8

What to Do on New Year’s Eve — I

Blue Yodel 9

How to Sweat

Blue Yodel 10

How Men Tell Time

Blue Yodel 11

What to Do on New Year’s Eve — II

Blue Yodel 12

The Roosters Don’t Like It

Blue Yodel 13

Secrets of Rooting

Blue Yodel 14

Why Wayne Newton’s Is Bigger Than Yours

Blue Yodel 15

The Secret of Gatorgate

Blue Yodel 16

Still in Remedial Bayoneting

Blue Yodel 17

I Always Plead Guilty

Blue Yodel 18

Out of the Clauset

I Didn’t Do It

Blue Yodel 19

The List of the Mohicans

Blue Yodel 20

My Cat Book Won’t Come

Blue Yodel 21

Secrets of the Apple

Blue Yodel 22

How to Sportswrite Good

Blue Yodel 23

The Truth about History

Blue Yodel 24

Why Not Active People in Beer?

Blue Yodel 25

If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close

Blue Yodel 26

Why I Live Where I Live, If I Do

Blue Yodel 27

ONE FELL SOUP

On Miscellaneity; Juice-Swapping

Issues and Answers

The Singing-Impaired

Loss: A Guide to Economics

Reagan, Begin, and God

99 Percent Foundation

Eat That Wig, Wear That Sandwich

I Think It Was Little Richard

The Socks Problem

Animal and Vegetable Spirits

Chickens

Hide the Razor on April Fools’

A Near-Score of Food Songs

Corn Prone

One Pig Jumped

Used Words

Is the Pope Capitalized?

Gryll’s State

How Miss Wren Stood in de Do’

On Hearing It Averred …

More Like a Buffalo, Please

Whose Who?

Syntax’s Tack

The New Writing Aids

Total Nudes and Bubbling Babies

Light Verse

Love and Other Indelicacies

You Make Me Feel Like …

So This Is Male Sexuality

I’d Rather Have You

Don’t Be Rambunctious around Your Grandma …

The Times: No Sh*t

To Live Is to Change

The Orgasm: A Reappraisal

Valentine

The Family Jewels

Thought She Was Eve

After Pink, What?

Between Meals Song

Jealousy Song

The Wages of Fun

No Bigger than a Minute

Sports Afield

Five Ives Gets Named

Why There Will Never Be a Great Bowling Novel

Ballooning with Slick

My B.P.

Merely Shot in the Head

A Bait Box of Green Jade?

Jock Lingerie

Get Out There and Make Statements!

The Presidential Sports Profile

M.D. to The Greatest

Dedicated to Fair Hooker

Wired Into Now

Wired Into Now

The In-House Effect

The Teeth Festival

Thinking Black Holes Through

Weekly News Quiz

That Dog Isn’t Fifteen

Notes from the Edge Conference

Facing Ismism

For the Record

CAMELS ARE EASY, COMEDY’S HARD

How a Camel Goes

Man Chewed by Many Animals

Eating Out of House and Home

The Vanity of Human Dishes

Tan

Gilda: This Stoff Came Outta Me?

Nancy Is Herself

Couldn’t Use Them in a Game

What Is Funny about the National Geographic?

Caesars for the Bath Gel

Wild Fish Ripped My Flesh

I Model for GQ

Demme: A Damn Good Kennel Man

You Don’t Say Mush

Yo Yo Yo, Rowa uh Rowa, Hru Hru

Yet Another True Study of Mankind

On Science

Hyenas Feel Good about Themselves

How to Struggle

We Feed, We Lions

Lit Demystified Quickly

Harper’s Bazaar Asked Me to Write a Review

The Way Mama Tells It

A Man’s Got to Read

On Manhood

MEOW Dumber Than War?

Words for the Gulf

Goofing on Yahweh

The Fall

On Being One’s Own Guy

Gutes and Eulas

The Puzzle Section

New World Order: Chaos

By Christ’s Ego! (Out of Aerobic Guilt)

Are We Ready for Leaders We Can Read?

Can Credibility Be Had?

Back-to-School Double Bind

Despicability Sucks!

Our Original Mama

Declining Change

Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me, Guess I’ll Go 15 Across

Slippery Pleasures

Too Hot to Smooch?

GOP Soul Train

Clusters Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out

Fly Third Class

The Sunday Paper: A Column

Three-Dot Column

In-Your-Face L-Wordism

Don’t Deficit There… DO SOMETHING

Should the South Re-Secede?

The New Solvency: We Owe It to Ourselves

Sticking It on the Gipper Sideways

Free Speech, My Foot

National Griper’s Day Is Just Like Everything Else These Days

The CEO Blues

Forgive Them, for They Have Told Us How They Did It

A Christmas Carol (for the Eighties)

Christmas Dwindles

Tomorrow Will Not Wait

And Now for the Resurrection (Blub)

Gospel Rap

Afternoon with a Buck

Good and Over

About the Author

What Men Don’t Tell Women

To Ennis,

before she goes off and leaves her old dad

Introduction

What Men Don’t Tell Women

Got me a pretty momma,

Got me a bulldog too.

Got me a pretty momma,

Got me a bulldog too.

My pretty momma don’t love me,

But my bulldog do.

—Jimmie Rodgers, Blue Yodel No. 10

I’m … No, I won’t tell you what I am.

—Henry Kissinger, interviewed by Oriana Fallaci

WOMEN probably think that what men do tell women is bad enough. What is to be gained by telling of such things as Flower Guilt, or Why on Earth Female Dogs Do That, or The Toilet-Seat Issue’s Unspoken Crux, or Why You Can’t Confess Fidelity. Secrets have reasons. And yet I feel impelled to lay these things before the public, which includes women. It is because of a vision I had at the Ladies’ Home Journal.

For me the Ladies’ Home Journal has always had a musky quality. It was a prime source of my earliest and most effluvial sex education. When I was a boy, nothing off-color came into our home except Moonbeam McSwine, whose languidly heaving surface, in Li’l Abner, was veiled by nothing but a tattered — or rather peeling — vestige of dirndl and splotches of mud, and who spent her time lolling with hogs. I now trace certain unhygienic dreams of my childish nights back to Moonbeam McSwine, and although Al Capp went sour toward the end of his days and always had a flawed ear for dialect (yo’ is short not for you, as Capp would have it, but for yore, as in yo’ momma), I am grateful to him.

But my mother subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal, and that was something else. Inside stuff. More than I felt was wise for me to know about, and yet I wanted to know. There were certain ads. (Modess … Because. Because what? What because what?) The Tell Me, Doctor column. And a regular feature called Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Marriage can be lost? Marriage? As in marriage that involves parents for instance and, say, little kids for example and, for instance, me — can be in jeopardy?) The Ladies’ Home Journal evoked the way my parents’ bed smelled when I climbed in with them in the morning. The primal funk. The gene-pool frowst. It smelled appalling. But homey. It must be saved.

I am not talking about any kind of specific whiff or anything specific that might have been going on in there. What kind of person do you think I am? I’m talking about the whole grave cohabitational bouquet. Books ought to be full of conjugal sheets.

Ironically enough, I was all set to call this book Clean Sheets.¹ Then the Ladies’ Home Journal invited me to come up and discuss story ideas. I welcomed the notion of a writing project wholesome enough to console my late mother, who taught me to read the way lions teach their cubs to pounce, and who never got over the fact that I once wrote about orgasms for Cosmopolitan. (That what I wrote was a spoof does not seem to have registered very clearly either with Cosmopolitan — see my book One Fell Soup, available in stores — or with that Sunday-school classmate of my mother who felt obliged to show the article to her. What I don’t understand is, why was anybody in my mother’s Sunday-school class reading Cosmopolitan?)

But when I went to the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, I learned that it had become a hard-hitting magazine proud of taking on burning controversial topics. (As if there were ever a topic more burning than Can This Marriage Be Saved?) The editors I talked to — two women of evident dynamism — wanted to know what I thought of the New Woman.

I liked these editors fine and was all for coming to terms with them. But I didn’t know what to say about the New Woman. I still don’t. I am sitting here, now, trying to think of something to say about the New Woman, in all candor and even desperation, and I can’t. And I couldn’t then.

So the topic shifted, slightly, to my marriage. I must have blurted something about my marriage. Soon one of the editors was exclaiming, ‘Fifties Man Married to Sixties Woman!’ Write us something about that! My blood ran cold. I said I didn’t want to.

"Why not?" they said. Well, I said, would they want to write about their marriages in a magazine? We do it all the time! they said.

We moved on. I let it slip that I had a seventeen-year-old daughter. ‘An Open Letter to My Daughter: Is Youth Wasted on the Young?’! they exclaimed. I said I didn’t want to write an open letter to my daughter in a magazine. They seemed incredulous. I began to mope. Right there in a room with New Women.

Okay, how about this, one of the editors tried. We had a writer who was going to do this, but he never did. How about ‘What Men Don’t Tell Women’!

Annnnngangang. My head swam.

Wh … why would I tell? I asked weakly. Their incredulity mounted.

I mean …, I said, like … Tell what?

For instance! one of them said. Physical Attractiveness Is Important!

Ahnh? I replied.

"What men don’t tell women is that men do look for physical appearance in a woman!"

"W … Women don’t know that?" I asked.

Frankly, it has always seemed to me that women have at least as pronounced a sense of the importance of a woman’s appearance as men do — hence whole industries; but I was damned if I was going to say that.

"That Men Are Attracted to Pretty, Dumb Women!" they said.

Well …, I said, beginning to feel like an American critic of American foreign policy enfolded by foreign critics of American foreign policy. "… I don’t know that I’d put it that way. In fact, I’m beginning to see more and more women my age showing up somewhere with cute young towheaded guys with no stomachs who never heard of Edward G. Robinson."

Actually I did not have in mind, very firmly, a single specific instance of this phenomenon; but I felt there was a case to be made along those lines and I had to say something. And if being attracted to pretty, dumb members of the opposite sex is a peculiarly male trait, I said, "then why do so many women love Elvis? Everybody is attracted, prima facie, to pretty members of the opposite sex, or of whatever sex they’re attracted to, and why not? And there’s something to be said for being attracted to people who can’t outsmart you."

I was overstating my case. I wasn’t at all sure I had a case and I was overstating it. I have a tendency sometimes to start saying things I don’t necessarily actually think, because I don’t want people to leap too soon to conclude that I can’t possibly think what I think they think I can’t possibly think.

Fortunately, I didn’t say some of those things about attractiveness out loud. Much of what I uttered to the Ladies’ Home Journal’s editors, I would imagine, had the ring of well-intentioned but pained moaning sounds.

But pained moaning sounds have reasons. The more I thought about it, after leaving the Ladies’ Home Journal, the more I realized that I had been writing about What Men Don’t Tell Women all my life. In my head or out. If there is anything this book, for instance, is full of, it is things that men don’t tell women. Also things that sick people don’t tell the well, things that Southern hosts don’t tell Northern guests, things that authors don’t tell readers, things that hardly anyone will tell anyone about money, things that all too few people tell all too many people who wear hats, and so on. But especially things that men don’t tell women.

Men don’t tell women these things for various reasons.

But I am an American! I believe in freedom of information! And I have never entirely emerged from the intersexual spell cast on me by intimations I gleaned from the Ladies’ Home Journal in my newtlike early youth.

Need men and women forever be two separate peoples? Can’t there be a link? I decided to give this book the title I have given it. Then I decided to prize apart the book’s intricately interlocking pieces and insert certain scraps of testimony, from men of many stripes, revealing for the first time the things that men don’t tell. I have called these revelations blue yodels, in tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, who made an art of the pained moaning sound.

One thing I have found myself unable to reveal is what happened on a certain date that I had many years ago with a cheerleader (see Secrets of Rooting, page 82). I will say this: It would never have happened if I had been able to tell her something.

1. Or, My Mind Is All Made Up (But You Can Hop on In).

Where’d You Get That Hat?

BLUE YODEL 1

JOSEPH

I just came from this Men and Masculinity Workshop. Rose has completed assertiveness training and she said if she was going to continue relating to me in a broader sense I needed to go through tenderness training and claim my wholeness. She said, Won’t it be nice? We’ll hang yours over the lowboy right next to mine. She has her assertiveness certificate up there. This workshop gives you one in tenderness.

It met in the Pierce High gym. We sat cross-legged on the floor to break down our stereotype image of how men sit. And we related our feelings while empathizing.

We learned how men have lost their aliveness in relationships because we have been programmed from an early age to always be in control. Alec was our counselor in getting us to open up. Alec said we had always wanted to be tender, but the society told us we couldn’t be, but the rapidly growing men’s movement was changing that.

We have to acknowledge that we have always been programmed that men have to always be the strong ones. And instead of using women as a dumping ground for our feelings, we have to not be isolated from other men. Alec told us to put our arm around the next man.

I put my arm around this one man, Neil. He said he was working on getting over his aversion to listening to women talk on the phone. He was getting into nonobjective phone conversation, where you talked to hear the other person’s voice. Also talking long-distance without any sense of time. He said it relaxed him. He said his problem came from his father always yelling for everybody in the family to get off the phone for Christ’s sake. It took him a long time to realize that relaxing on the phone wasn’t sacrilegious. He said he heard there was a way you could apply for a grant to pay your phone bill.

This other man, Jerry, opened up to the group and said his father was not a feeling, emotional man. This other man with a name like Uli said his father wasn’t either.

There were these teenage kids coming into the gym bouncing a basketball.

Then Neil said he had something to say he’d never told anybody. He said he walked past his parents’ bedroom one morning on his way to breakfast and instead of being at the breakfast table already his father was lying there in the bed still, crying. His mother was burning bacon. Alec asked Neil how this made him feel. Neil said it was why he lost his erection every time he thought of bacon.

Alec said see, that was that whole male myth.

I wished I had my arm around Uli or Jerry instead. What I really wished was that Alec would hurry up and give us our certificates. I could feel Neil tensing up to tell something else. But then these teenage kids said they had the gym.

Alec said no, we had the gym for another half hour.

These kids said no, they had the gym now. Some of them were over messing with Alec’s papers and laughing. Alec went and got his papers.

One of the kids said to Alec, "Hey, what’s your problem, man?"

Alec said his problem was all men’s problem, grappling with changing roles. He asked the kids if they’d like to sit in on the rest of the session.

The kid with the ball was dribbling real hard right next to me and Neil where we were sitting cross-legged on the floor. And then Neil stood up and started telling about how we were trying to become whole people and the kid bounced the ball off Neil’s nose.

And then the kids started pounding on all of us while we were getting un-cross-legged and our arms untangled and Neil stole the ball and drove half the court and missed a lay-up. I thought that was pretty cool, if he’d hit it. And the kid Neil stole the ball from pulled out a knife and we left the gym.

We stood outside on the steps. Neil was bleeding. Alec pointed out to us that the kids were caught up in the whole male myth, and we had gotten something out of the experience. He suggested we take turns helping Neil stop bleeding.

So we did, and Neil said his father always accused him of not playing tough when he was hurt. He said one time he had a sprained ankle in the CYO basketball championship and his father made him tape it up and play. I was eleven, he said. My father said, ‘Be a Marine.’ And Neil missed four lay-ups and his team lost. Neil said he missed lay-ups to prove something to his father.

Then I said, Well, can we have our certificates? They were all jumbled up and when Alec got them straight and handed them out, somebody had written FAGIT in big letters on mine.

How will I tell Rose?

How to Visit the Sick

BOUNDING into the room is wrong. Hospitalized people do not like to be bounded in upon. The first thing visitors should see as they step off the elevator is the following sign.

PLEASE DO NOT TRY OUR PATIENTS BY

But there is no way to squeeze onto one sign all the things that hospital visitors should bear in mind. Some people assume that just by visiting someone who is sick, they are doing a heartwarming thing. That is like assuming that just because you are walking out onto a stage, you are doing an entertaining thing. A person in a hospital bed is often tempted to take advantage of his position (whose advantages are few enough) by cutting into visitors’ conversation sharply with: "If somebody doesn’t say something interesting pretty soon I’m going to hemorrhage."

But he doesn’t want to deprive his visitors — call them the Bengtsons — of the chance to feel warmhearted. So he doesn’t complain.¹ He just lies there, biding his time until the day when he is up and around and the Bengtsons aren’t, and he can visit them in a hospital and spill their ice water on their pillows. And the Bengtsons, of course, will have to say, Oh that’s all right! Don’t worry!

One of the burdens of the hospitalized person is that he is, in a sense, the host, and must be gracious to the well. Even though the well often go too far in playing down the seriousness of the patient’s complaint: "What you’ve been through is nothing! My sister had both of hers taken out with no anesthetic."

Or they play it up too much: You poor thing. I could no more have borne up under this terrible thing the way you have than … Of course, I don’t think the full impact of it has hit you yet.

Or they claim too much expertise with regard to the patient’s complaint: "Oh, no, no, that’s not right at all. What you’ve actually had removed is urethral stones. My aunt had the same thing and I did some research on it to fill her in. You see, your trouble is too many cola drinks. Probably been going on for years. So that a kind of fine brown sediment …"

Or they are too innocent: "Where exactly is the prostate, anyway?"

What are some guidelines to appropriate visitor behavior?

Be sensitive, but not to a fault. Say you are telling a story about frogs. It is better to go ahead and use the word croak than to stop at croa — and bolt from the room.

Bring gossip. Preferably gossip about people other than the patient. But do not preface such gossip with something like, Be grateful you’re in here. If you were able to work you’d probably be getting fired like Morris Zumer.

Bring anecdotes that make interns and nurses look foolish. Once, in an emergency ward, an intern was trying to deal with a patient who had delirium tremens. It’s your imagination! the intern insisted. The patient seized him by the necktie so ferociously that the intern could neither breathe nor break the patient’s grip. The intern cried out for a nurse, who arrived. Get … scissors … cut … tie, the intern gasped. The nurse briskly left the room, returned with scissors, pounced, and snipped off the intern’s tie — the loose end.

That is a story someone told me in a hospital once, and I enjoyed it. It may not be perfect for every patient. Some patients may prefer quieter stories. Others may have delirium tremens, in which case entertainment is the last thing they need. Every patient is different. But there are three rules that apply to visitors in every case:

Are you reading this in someone’s hospital room? Can it possibly have been left, on purpose, where you would find it? If by any chance you found it under the patient’s bed, please get out from under there.

And now please let the patient watch Family Feud in peace.

1. The careful reader will note that sometimes my pronouns imply that every person in the world is male, and sometimes that he isn’t. When I go out of my way to avoid saying something like, The trouble with nuclear conflagration is that it will leave man with no sense of his sociometric place (by saying, The trouble with nuclear conflagration is that it will leave a person with no sense of his sociometric place, or hers either), it is because I am suffering from Pronoun Guilt. The question of sexism in pronouns is one that deeply concerns me, since that is the kind of guy I am. I have invented new pronouns, none of which I will cite here because there is nothing quite so funny-looking as a new pronoun. I have devised hermaphroditic characters named Heshie and Sheehy, who have failed to find favor as pronoun replacements. Man has yet to deliver himself from Pronoun Guilt.

BLUE YODEL 2

KEN

I know this guy, says he has Flower Guilt.

"What?" I say.

He says, "Let’s face it: Men don’t like flowers."

I say I like flowers.

"Okay, he says. You like flowers. But you don’t love flowers."

"I don’t know," I say.

"But you aren’t moved by flowers," he says.

"I really like planting zinnias," I say.

"Ah! he says. Sure. Delving in the ground. Improving your property. But you don’t like getting flowers."

"I guess I don’t. Because it would mean I was in the hospital."

"Exactly, he says. But women like getting flowers."

I say that’s true.

"Women love getting flowers. Women are moved when they get flowers. All women. Every woman. Sending flowers to a woman is like … heroin to them."

"Well…," I say.

"Okay. But you see my point. My point is, all a man has to do is call a florist — ‘Dozen roses, MasterCard number so-and-so, address such-and-such’ — and he has done something that a woman will perceive as sweet."

"So what’s wrong with that?"

"To a woman, having flowers sent to her is thoughtful. To a man, sending flowers is a way of being thoughtful without putting any thought into it. It’s like foreign aid."

I told him I wasn’t sure I saw the connection there.

"Okay, forget that, he says. My point is, when you can melt a woman by doing something that doesn’t involve any intrinsic emotion on your part, detachment sets in. Dissociation. Guilt. I send my wife flowers every couple of weeks. A computer could do it. It makes her happy. It makes her happy." He has this pained look. "I’m glad she’s happy. But…"

"Okay, I say. So why don’t you send Shana"— that’s his wife — "why don’t you send Shana something thoughtful that does require thought?"

"Because that’s how I always get in trouble."

What Authors Do

I AM not the kind of person who feels right about calling himself a writer, even. It sounds like something you would assert, falsely, in a singles bar. (A friend of mine once asked a young woman what she did. I’m a novelist, she said. Really? he replied. Would I have heard of any of them? I haven’t finished it yet, she said.) I’ll bet Jesse James, when asked what his line of work was, never said, I’m a desperado. He probably said, Oh, something in trains.

But job description does come up. I remember once I walked through a door while poking around in a journalistic capacity backstage at a country music show. Actually my mind was not on the poking so much as on turning a sentence, then in an early development phase, that I thought frankly might buff up pretty nice. Are you an artist? someone asked. Well …, I said in all modesty. Then I saw what he was driving at. I had walked through the wrong door.

Years passed. Then, the other morning at a pancake breakfast, someone — a member of the general public — gave me a funny look and asked, out of the blue, Are you an author?

The world shifted for me at that moment.

Hitherto, I had thought of being an author as an occasional thing, like being the groom. I was not working this pancake breakfast, I was just there to eat. Was I going to have to start living … an author’s life?

I don’t think writers ever say author. Publishers do, but that is just one more reason why the old question so often arises: What exactly, other than absentmindedness, can the publishing industry and writers ever have imagined they had in common?

What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, I’m authoring. The Oxford English Dictionary cites, from Chapman’s Iliad, The last foul thing Thou ever author’dst. The OED does not explain how author’dst is pronounced, but I imagine the full quotation is either

Thou mak’st appearances, through the mist

Of the last foul thing Thou ever author’dst

or

Thou goest on Carson; we bog down amidst

The last foul thing Thou ever author’dst.

Writer derives from various ancient verbs meaning to tear, to cut, to scratch, to wear by rubbing. Before English got write, wrote and written right, it tried wryte, vryte, vryet, wryt, wrighte, wreitte, wreat, wrait, wraet, vreet, wrijte, wroite, wreyte, whryte, wrythe, wreyt, wrytte, vryt, vriht, wrygth, wryght, writte, vrit, wret, wrette, wrete, wreit, ureit, wireete, vrait, wrat, whrat, vrat, wart, wratte, wraite, wrayt, wraat, wrot, wrotte, wroate, wroght, wroot, wroott, wrout, wryton, writun, wrytyn, wreotan, wreoton, wreten, ywriten, ywriton, ywritein, ywryten, ywrytyn, uuriten, vrityn, wyrtyn, vyrtyn, whryttyn, vrutten, vreittin, reaten, wraitten and many others.

Author comes from the Latin to promote, increase. Authors, as we know, sell more books than writers do.

But authors crop up not only on promotional tours. An author also gives talks to young people about how to become an author. Youth looks upon him more or less expectantly, and if he were candid he would refer to his own school days and say, All I ever wanted was for people not to look at me like I was a dip. But that wouldn’t be authorial, and also he is afraid that dip may mean something completely different today. He advises plenty of writing, and reading.

An author reads. Not to himself, quietly; he has no time for that. To others, aloud. As it happens, literature is that which is lost aloud. The whole point of writing is to get something down in a voice that is better than the writer’s own. When the writer tries to render this better voice in his own, the harmony isn’t close. Sometimes too he may look up from such better-self abuse and make eye contact with someone in the audience. In its place, such contact may be all well and good. In literature … Say you are perusing away through The Portrait of a Lady. How would you like to turn a page and see, not the lady’s, but Henry James’s eye? In all its helpless ferocity. And do you think James would be at ease with yours?

An author also takes part in symposia. A symposium, even if all the panelists hate each other outright, is a more companionable affair than writing. However, a symposium poses a problem that the writer has devoted his life to avoiding: thinking of something worth saying while saying it.

A writer is loath to repeat himself. An author is bound to. Sometimes four times on different talk shows in one twelve-hour period in Philadelphia. An author is bound even to quote himself. With or without attribution. It was I, I believe, who wrote … It goes against the grain. (Of a writer.)

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

An author is a person who, if he or she is not a hermit, goes down to Memphis and is informed quite unlasciviously by a Friend of the Library, You are my author for the afternoon.

An author is a person who is informed that he is to give a talk at a Book and Author Dinner and then a few days later is advised not to count on it, unless certain other authors cancel out, because the event’s sponsors have realized that they invited too many Southern (or whatever the author’s genus is) authors.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.

Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books — I don’t care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible — that are on the shelves. And then … Say you are Ewell Loblate, author of Don’t Try This at Home.

You go to the counter and ask, "Do you have that book, uh, Don’t, uh, Try This … at Home?" The clerk, who is listening to Black Sabbath through an earplug, looks blank.

What’s it on? he says, after waiting to see whether you will leave.

"Oh, well, sort of … autobiogra … not strictly, but…"

By now there is no doubt in the clerk’s mind that even if you won’t leave, you should.

Who’s the author? he inquires.

Uh, I believe … something like … Oh, the horror! Lollib … Libl … uh, Loblate?

The clerk makes an indifferent noise. I’ll call downstairs.

Oh, you needn’t … But the machinery is in motion. After a long, long wait, as the clerk moves with understated sinuousness to some hellish cranial thrum and sells eleven copies of a book, on which high hopes are pinned, about weight loss through cats, here comes the conveyor belt, loudly, bearing a (the) copy of your book, blinking in the light.

Now, you don’t want to buy your book. On an author’s earnings, you can’t afford it. On the other hand, you don’t want to thumb through your book under the gaze of this person, this link to the reading public, and then say no, no thanks, you don’t believe it is exactly what you had in mind.

But what you want most of all not to do is let the clerk catch sight of your picture on the jacket.

Which he does. Hey! he shouts, at last interested. This looks like you! More loudly. "This you?"

Well … no. That is, I …

"Hey, this is you! Hey! Here’s an author! Asking for his own book! Hey, wouldn’t they give you any? HEY!"

And all the shoppers in the store gather round and are joined from the street by several people who have never been in a bookstore before, and they all marvel and hoot and cry Author! and poke each other (Says it’s autobiographical! cries the clerk), roll their eyes, press in to check the picture against your face for themselves, howl, then scatter, shaking their heads in disbelief. This happens to some authors several times a day.

Still, to author is to promote, to increase. To grow. One develops a knack. I myself believe, in fact, that although I have had many years more experience at writing than at being an author, I am better at the latter. I think I would be quite good, for instance, at receiving prestigious awards. Any awards.

It may be that in time, taking one thing with the other, an author becomes inured. Develops a sense of himself as one of those bearded faces in Authors, the card game he played as a child. Pens one of those big two-page ads for the International Paper Company proving that today the printed word is more vital than ever.

I don’t mean to suggest that I have myself made any real strides toward this reconciliation. But I did have an inkling of it once in Atlanta, on a radio call-in show. An elderly-sounding woman called in and said, I saw you on the David Susskind program.

This, if I may say so without seeming churlish, is the kind of thing people say to authors. I saw your book. I saw your article in that magazine. I saw you on something. Then they pause. If they were to go on and say, by some chance, And it was [or you were] good, you could reply, God bless you. But they do not go on and say anything. I tend to answer God bless you anyway and then regret it; but something in this call-in woman’s tone led me to murmur noncommittally.

And I want you to know, she went on, that you gave a terrible account of the South.

Ah, well, I countered lightly, knowing that similar things had been said of Jerry Lee Lewis, Walt Disney and Richard Wright.

I knew your late daddy, she went on, and I want you to know he’d be ashamed of you.

This did not sit well with me. Even authorial graciousness has its limits. "Did you know your daddy?" a writer, given time, would have riposted. The author, live on the air, huffed and gurgled.

You mumbled, she continued, "your hair looked terrible, and you slouched down in your seat."

With that she was gone. I sat there outraged. Forgot all my exiguously charted-out perceptions. Ventured, in response to the next caller, remarks that I realized, as they winged uneditably over the ether, were not only meaningless but, I regret to say, untrue.

Then came a call from another woman. A kind person. Who gave me the strength to author on.

I saw you on David Susskind too, she said. And I see all the authors that come on. And I want you to know, she said, that you don’t slouch any worse than Joyce Carol Oates.

BLUE YODEL 3

THREE YOUTHS

Three youths on subway. FIRST YOUTH, the shortest, says a girl has told him she wants him to leave her alone. He is inclined to leave her alone.

SECOND YOUTH: Naw. That’s what she want you to do.

THIRD YOUTH: Can’t do that.

SECOND YOUTH: You do, she be the first one talking shit on you. "He a fag, I tole him to leave me alone; he leave me alone."

THIRD YOUTH: You can act like you leavin’ her alone. But don’t do it.

The Lowdown on Southern Hospitality

COME on in! Busy? Me? No! Sit right down here in my favorite chair and keep me up all night and drink all my liquor. Can I run out and kill our last chicken and fry her up for you? No? Wouldn’t take a minute. Are you sure? Oh, don’t let the chicken hear you, she’ll be so disappointed.

What can I do to make you comfortable?

You want me to tell you about Southern hospitality?

Well.

It is true that I live in the North, but am Southern. So I have a certain perspective. For one thing, living in the North enables me to retain the belief that there still is a South, as such.

In the past, to be sure, I have accepted invitations to speak in a Bogalusa, Louisiana, home on Southern Hospitality: Is It All It’s Cracked Up to Be? and at an inn in Millinocket, Maine, on Northern Hospitality: Why Isn’t It Cracked Up to Be Anything? I have engaged a descendant of General William Tecumseh Sherman in a widely reported debate, staged in a model Southern kitchen at the world’s fair, on the question Resolved: That to Be a Host in the North and a Guest in the South Is the Best of Both Worlds.

And yet I have a certain resistance to comparisons between Northern and Southern anything.

I do not say — although, in my capacity as host, I am willing to, if it will fulfill your expectations — that all regional generalizations appearing in Northern newspapers are wrong. Nor do I say that when a Northerner exclaims over Southern hospitality it is necessarily very much like Ronald Reagan’s saying that if it weren’t for women, men would still be carrying clubs.

I just don’t want, myself, to pretend to be more of an expert than I am.

I am often asked: What are Southern women like? That is a question that many people feel entitled to an answer to. But I cannot speak with authority — not with authority as it is known in the South — about Southern women. I am acquainted with no more than two-thirds of them, and several of those I haven’t seen in some time.

By the same token (it was Heraclitus, I believe, who said that you can enter the subway a thousand times, but never by the same token), I have not stayed in the great majority of homes and hotels, or patronized a majority of the stores and restaurants, in the South. Nor in the North, thank God. I have never gotten over the sight of whatever it was that was served to me as fried chicken one night in Akron.

"This is fried chicken?" I asked the waiter.

He looked at it. I think so, he said.

I rest my case.

But that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as Northern hospitality.

True, it is possible to meet with a less than heartwarming reception up North. I remember one Sunday morning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to a cafeteria to get coffee and a donut before meeting a friend in business school.

I was greeted by a little machine that gave out tickets. I took a ticket, and ordered coffee and a donut from the woman behind the steam table, who was gazing with angst down into a vat of scrambled eggs. I was tempted to tell her I agreed that scrambled eggs should never be assembled in vat-sized proportions, but she seemed to be thinking about something even worse. Without speaking or even looking up, she served me and punched my ticket so as to show how much I owed. I found a table, and after drinking my coffee, and eating my donut, and not bothering a soul, I presented the ticket to the woman at the cash register.

Everything seemed to be in order. I wasn’t expecting anything more than a smooth transaction, but I was expecting that, a smooth transaction.

The woman at the cash register looked at my ticket, then raised her eyes as though in supplication. Jaysus Murray and Jeosuph, she cried, pursing her lips unevenly like Humphrey Bogart. Why do all you people come in on the weekends?

That was nearly twenty years ago. To this day, I don’t know what was wrong. I was too shaken to visit the business school, where they probably teach courses in putting the customer on the defensive.

But I wouldn’t call that an example of Northern hospitality, exclusively. In Nashville, Tennessee, I cultivated a hamburger joint for weeks, ordering, with an iron will, the same thing every time. Finally I came in and said, The usual.

You mean ‘the regular,’ the counter person, named Opaline, said.

Well, I replied. I thought I meant the usual. I thought I was the regular. But I didn’t argue. The regular, then, I said.

In your case, she said, what’s that?

Once I was driving through Kentucky, which is a border state. I stopped at a truck stop, at about 2 AM, for some coffee.

Where’s that kid sister of yours? a skinny trucker was saying to one of the waitresses.

Oh gone off. We don’t know where, she said. She’s a wild kid, for nine.

Hee-a-hee, I got a kick out of her, the skinny man said. I’d say something and she’d come right back with something.

She don’t let you get nothing on her, the waitress said. She’s that much like Elizabeth.

Then a second waitress came over and said, perhaps in reference to Elizabeth, You know she says she cleans out im sills evuh day, and Miz Clarkson come in here and said when im sills been cleaned out, and she said I done urn this afternoon. And you know they was roaches in there that had died and was rotted. I said they sure do rot quick around here.

Well, I was put off a bit by such forthrightness about infestation, but I wanted to fall in with the camaraderie. Also, nobody had looked at me yet, and I needed coffee.

No roaches in the coffee, are there? I asked genially.

Immediately the waitress grew sullen. No, at’s just over’ere in im sills, she said. You want some coffee?

But I could tell she didn’t care. There I was, at 2 AM, somewhere near a town called Sopping Gorge, in a diner where I wasn’t wanted.

Still, Southern hospitality is an institution. Climate is a factor. In the South, people are more likely to be sitting out on the porch when folks show up. You can’t pretend not to be at home, when there you are sitting on the porch. You can pretend to be dead, but then you can’t fan yourself.

Rhetoric is another factor. The salesperson in Rich’s Basement in Atlanta may give you just as glazed a look as the one in Filene’s Basement in Boston, but the former is more likely to say, These overalls are going to make your young one look cute as pea-turkey. Southerners derive energy from figures of speech, as plants do from photosynthesis.

I’ll tell you something about Northerners, as a class: They don’t think they are typical. A Southerner is too polite to tell them that they are. So they don’t go out of their way to be. That is what’s so typical about them.

Southerners get a charge out of being typical. If a Northern visitor makes it clear to Southerners that he thinks it would be typical of them to rustle up a big, piping hot meal of hushpuppies and blackstrap, Southerners will do that, even if they were planning to have just a little salad that night.

Then the visitor will ask how to eat hushpuppies and blackstrap. If a Southerner were to go up North and ask how, or why, he was supposed to eat sushi, Northerners would snicker. But Southerners don’t even let on to a Northerner that he is being typical when he asks how you eat hushpuppies and blackstrap.

The strictly accurate answer is that nobody in his or her right mind eats these two things, together, in any way at all. But that isn’t a sociable answer. So Southerners may say, "First you pour your plate full of the molasses, and then you crumble your hushpuppies up in it, and then you take the back of your spoon, and …" Southerners will say things like that just to see whether it is still true that Northerners will believe anything. About the South.

Northerners, too, will explain things to visitors. It is a misconception that nobody in New York City, for instance, will offer you any guidance on the street. If you allow your pace to lag for a moment, longtime residents will assume you’re from out of town (which as far as they are concerned could be Delaware or Namibia), and will come running up to you asking, triumphantly, Are you lost? Then they will start giving you directions. These directions are usually wrong (although you can’t count on it), but they enable longtime residents to feel that they are not lost.

That is one kind of distinctive Northern hospitality. Another kind is when you walk into a dry cleaner’s for the thirtieth time and the proprietor, recognizing you at last, says, You again! If you are willing to accept that he is never going to welcome you, then you’re welcome.

The advantage of this form of Northern hospitality is that it works irritation right into the equation, up front. Let’s face it, people irritate each other. Especially hosts and guests.

The truth is, irritation is involved in Southern hospitality too. Say you run into a Southerner where you live in the North. And you take a thorn out of his paw or something and he declares, I want you to come visit us! And I want you to sleep in my bed! Me and Momma will take the cot! And bring your whole family!

Yes, do come, says the Southern wife. "We would love it."

And I want you to hold my little baby daughter on your lap! her husband cries. And Momma will cook up a whole lot of groceries and we’ll all eat ourselves half to death!

And sure enough, you show up. And the Southerners swing wide the portal and blink a little, and then recognize you and start hollering: "You came! Hallelujah! Sit down here! How long can you stay? Oh, no, you got to stay longer than a week, it’ll take that long just to eat the old milk cow. Junior, run out back and kill the old milk cow. Milk her first.

Here, let us carry all your bags — oh, isn’t this a nice trunk — upstairs and …

You are a little disappointed to note that there is no verandah.

"Oh, we lost our verandah in the Waw. Which Waw? Why the Waw with you all. But that’s all right."

And you are prevailed upon to stay a couple of weeks, and you yield to the Southerners’ insistence that you eat three huge meals a day and several snacks — and finally you override the Southerners’ pleas that you stay around till the scuppernongs get ripe, and they say, Well, I guess if you got your heart set on leaving us, in a put-out tone of voice, and they pack up a big lunch of pecan pie and collard greens for you to eat on the way home, and after you go through about an hour and a half of waving, and repeating that you really do have to go, and promising to come back, soon, and to bring more of your relatives next time, you go on back North.

And the Southerners close their door. And they slump back up against it. And they look at each other wide-eyed. And they say, shaking their heads over the simplemindedness of Yankees, "They came!"

And like to never left!

And ate us out of house and home!

Nothing — not even the sight of people eating hushpuppies mushed up in blackstrap molasses — is sweeter than mounting irritation prolongedly held close to the bosom.

BLUE YODEL 4

ROGER

I don’t understand guys who say they’re feminists. That’s like the time Hubert Humphrey, running for President, told a black audience that he was a soul brother.

And say you fall in love with somebody and it turns out she’s not a feminist. It happens. You’ve kind of painted yourself into a corner now, haven’t you? What are you going to say — you’ve always believed in feminism but you’ll give it up for her? How’s she going to take that?

Another thing. Do not be more Catholic than the Pope. You know what I’m saying?

High-heel shoes. The other night I’m watching Miss America. Cheryl walks in and says, "That’s disgusting. Women parading around in bathing suits and heels!"

"You’re right, I say. If there was a show on television, of men walking around in bathing suits and high heels, I’d think it was disgusting. And I think this is disgusting. In fact, high-heel shoes to begin with! Talk about barbarous practices! They’re like foot binding."

"Mm," she says, and I should’ve quit then.

"I’ll tell you the whole point of high-heel shoes, I say. It’s so Madeleine Carroll can’t run fast and Robert Donat has to keep reaching back and helping her along when they’re fleeing the authorities. Without high-heel shoes, Madeleine Carroll can probably beat Robert Donat by half a dozen strides over a hundred yards, and the system can’t have that!"

"Mm," she says, and I sure should’ve quit then.

"But you know what? I say. I don’t think men like high-heel shoes on women. Particularly. I don’t think men — I mean individual husbands and things — make women wear ’em. If every woman in the world started wearing penny-loafers, I don’t think it would bother men. Men like women with as few shoes on as possible. Granted, hookers wear high heels. But I think hookers dress for other hookers. I’ll tell you another thing — women having to pierce their ears. I don’t think men get excited over earrings on women either. And when I see Chrissie Evert playing tennis in earrings…"

I notice Cheryl is silent.

"Don’t you think? I say. About high heels, I say. I mean, if you like high heels, it’s fine. It just … seems like they’re … You see what I mean?"

I notice Cheryl is still silent.

"I was just…, I say. I mean … Make your legs look good and all, I guess. But your legs look good anyway. Great anyway. And don’t high heels kind of bunch up your — women’s. People’s. Calves? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just … Taller of course too, but men don’t… And, heh-heh, your butt too, but… You see what I mean?"

"Why is it so important to you?" she snaps.

On Hats

CLOTHES are not my strong suit, but I do know this: Public hanging ended in England because of the hat.

According to Richard D. Altick, in Victorian Studies in Scarlet, a German named Müller murdered an elderly man on a North London Railway train in 1864 and was convicted because he accidentally exchanged hats with the victim after a struggle. His own hat was found in the compartment, and he was presently discovered wearing the victim’s — only with the crown cut down so as to eliminate the victim’s name on the inside. Forthwith there sprang up a stylish hat, like a topper only half as tall, called the Müller cut-down. The crowd that gathered during the night before Müller’s hanging was unruly. Several well-dressed congregants were bonneted — that is, someone sneaked up from behind and pulled their hats down over their faces — garroted, and robbed. Parliament was at last provoked to forbid public executions.

The hat. Our most resonant garment. According to Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, by Newbell Niles Puckett, American slaves (who had to believe in something other than America) believed that if you put on another person’s hat you’ll get a headache unless you blow into the hat first; that it is bad luck to put your hat on inside out; that the bad luck promised by a rabbit’s crossing the road ahead of you may be averted by putting your hat on backward; that if you desire eggs to hatch into roosters you should carry them to the nest in a man’s hat; that a group of people was once crossing a field at noon when they suddenly saw a whole house coming after them, which passed so close that it knocked off their hats, and neither hats nor house was seen again; that if you eat with your hat on you will not get enough.

And yet it seems to me that people these days wear hats lightly. People have somehow gotten hold of the notion that a hat is a fun topping. Nothing in this world makes a person who is not a cowboy look less like a cowboy than wearing a cowboy hat, and yet we have recently passed through a period when every third nonpunk person in New York and Los Angeles was in for the full ten gallons.

Hey! You can’t just walk around wearing a cowboy hat. I don’t walk around wearing one, and I have herded cows. Somehow years ago I lost the tan felt cowboy hat I got (with the card inside that says Like Hell It’s Yours) at the White Front Store in Fort Worth. I wore it on working visits to a Texas cattle ranch to which I was then related by marriage. That hat and I were rained on twice, and the trained eye could discern traces of horse slobber on its brim and a touch of cow paddy (it can happen) on its crown. That hat fit me so well that — well, I’ll tell you how well it fit me.

One evening a bunch of us were in the back of a pickup truck, hurtling through the night toward a mudhole to pull out a mired heifer. It was too dark for abandoned driving, but the driver, Herman Posey, got caught up in the holiday spirit pervading us visitors, and before we knew it he had us jouncing and plummeting, off the ground more than on it, over creek bed, armadillo, and cactus.

Bob Crittendon, the foreman, was with us in the back. He weighed a good deal more than two hundred pounds and didn’t find any charm in being jounced. He was busy yelling, "Herman, damn you, slow down!"

And yet he took the time to mention, Old Roy’s the only one don’t have to hold on to his hat.

And. Yet. I wouldn’t wear that hat around town.

When I’m around town I don’t want to be always backing up a hat. You might think it would back up that hat for me to tell that story about what Bob Crittendon said. But it wouldn’t be the same as hearing Bob say it. To back up a cowboy hat you have to think of a remark of your own, like the one a man I know named Jimmy Crafton, in Nashville, thought of when a man picked his cowboy hat up off a bar and tried it on.

Crafton gave him a look.

The man thought better of what he had done, and apologized.

That’s all right, said Crafton. That’s why I wear a fifty-dollar hat. If it was a two-hundred-dollar hat, he explained, I’da had to kill you.

I’ll say another thing. Nobody ought to wear a Greek fisherman’s cap who doesn’t meet two qualifications:

1. He is Greek.

2. He is a fisherman.

What I am getting at is, a hat ought not to be on a head for a whim. Yeats once said that when a poem is finished it comes right with a click like a closing box. That’s what a hat ought to do for a person. Quite often today, though the person may think it does, it doesn’t.

I like to wear a hat around home and driving,